People abandon moral conduct without abandoning moral standards

Evidence

Most of the theorizing and research on morality focuses heavily on the acquisition of moral standards and moral reasoning, often detached from moral conduct. However, the acquisition of moral standards is only half the story in the exercise of moral agency. Moral standards, whether characterized as conscience, moral prescripts, or principles, do not function as unceasing internal regulators of conduct. People often face pressures to engage in harmful activities that provide desired benefits but violate their moral standards. To engage in those activities and live with themselves, they have to strip morality from their actions or invest them with worthy purposes. Disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables people to compromise their moral standards and still retain their sense of moral integrity. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 56

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core mechanism the reader wants: it explains how ordinary people rationalize Islamophobic/racist policy per Cooper and authoritarianism claims in the vault.
• DEEPTHINKING: The thesis that moral standards do not regulate conduct unceasingly, and that disengagement preserves a sense of integrity, is a paradigm-shifting framework for the vault’s existing claims.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 56